Benchmarking methodology for IPv4aaS technologies: Comparison of the scalability of the Jool implementation of 464XLAT and MAP-T

Abstract

A novel method is proposed for the performance and scalability measurements of the IPv4-as-a-Service (IPv4aaS) technologies. It works according to the dual Device Under Test (DUT) setup of RFC 8219 and is suitable for benchmarking any of the five IPv4aaS technologies: Combination of Stateful and Stateless Translation (464XLAT), Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite), Lightweight 4over6 (Lw4o6), Mapping of Address and Port with Encapsulation (MAP-E), and Mapping of Address and Port using Translation (MAP-T). The method is based on the reduction of the aggregate of Customer Edge (CE) and Provider Edge (PE) devices to a stateful network address translation from IPv4 to IPv4 (stateful NAT44) gateway. The most important advantage of the novel method is that a stateful NAT44 tester can be used instead of a technology-specific tester, which usually does not exist. The proposed method is validated by the examination of the performance and scalability of the Jool implementation of 464XLAT and MAP-T. Scalability is defined by both (1) how performance increases with the number of active Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores; and (2) how performance decreases with the increasing number of concurrent sessions. Maximum connection establishment rate and throughput are used as performance metrics. The scalability of 464XLAT and MAP-T is measured from 1 to 16 CPU cores and from 1 million to 256 million connections. The measurement details and results are fully disclosed and discussed.